Aura

Aura, a novella by Fuentes, was published in its original Spanish in 1962 and later translated into English in 1968. Narrated by a young scholar who has been hired by an elderly woman to write the memoirs of her husband, a deceased general, the novella reveals how the past and present are often interlocked and how time is fluid, rather than progressive, through the figure of Aura, who is a projected ghostlike image of the general's widow at her most beautiful. In this novella, Fuentes's use of the second person "you" is meant to pull the reader into the web-like reality that the scholar is caught up in. He cannot escape the past nor extricate himself from others as his identity slowly transforms into that of the dead general. Because of its accessibility and brevity, Aura has been anthologized widely as a classic example of Magic Realism's ability to...